STRAIGHT FROM THE SOURCE

Satoshi’s to-do list was long at the dawn of 2009, but he was determined to get the new year off to a flier. Having launched the Bitcoin network on January 3rd, he followed up five days later by publishing the Bitcoin source code. Written in the C++ programming language and available on Windows initially, it provided a deep insight into Satoshi’s mindset – not to mention his coding ability.

While many Bitcoiners have read the whitepaper, few have done the same with the Bitcoin source code, which is understandable given its length and complexity to non-coders. Thankfully, mastery of C++ isn’t required to appreciate the majesty – and occasional oddity – that is Bitcoin’s initial codebase.

Just as Satoshi shared an early draft of his whitepaper with a handful of cryptographers, he did the same in late 2008 with the source code. This pre-release version contains a number of curious features that didn’t make the official v0.1 release of January 8th 2009: a framework for an IRC client, a peer-to-peer marketplace, and a virtual poker game. Faint hints, perhaps, of the sort of use cases Satoshi envisioned Bitcoin supporting. It also used the term “bitcoin miner” – which significantly didn’t appear in the whitepaper.

Fascinating as these quirks are, they’re merely a sideshow to the main event: Satoshi’s ingenious solution to long-standing cryptographic challenges. In approximately 15,000 lines of code, v0.1 solved the “double-spending” problem associated with digital currencies, outlining the Proof-of-Work mechanism that achieved this. It also contained the code required to run Bitcoin’s P2P network and even managed to include the full GUI for the first Bitcoin wallet.

“The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime.” – Satoshi Nakamoto.

Absolutely Alpha

By the time Satoshi released Bitcoin’s code, he was reasonably confident that it would work: he’d checked and rechecked everything, and the network had been running reliably for several days on his personal computer. But as he acknowledged when sharing the SourceForge link on the Cryptography Mailing List, the code was “still alpha and experimental,” leaving “no guarantee the system’s state won’t have to be restarted at some point.”

Bitcoin evangelist Fefe Demeny opines: “Satoshi created Bitcoin as a movement that was going to help millions escape a rigged system and reclaim control of their money. He delivered the most profound innovation of our era, yet chose to remain anonymous, giving the gift without seeking the glory. The Bitcoin ledger is transparent for anyone to see, but Satoshi’s identity stays hidden, steadily transforming from mystery into a legend, a legend that will be told for generations to come.”

One man doesn’t make a network, and thus for Bitcoin to prove itself, it was imperative that it was run by more than a single node. First to take the bait and click the download link appears to have been Hal Finney, who congratulated Satoshi on January 10th, adding: “I am looking forward to trying it out.” None of the testers who joined Hal that week had any idea they were making history: they were simply downloading another random piece of software to play around with.

But at least some of those early pioneers who unpacked the files and ran the client saw more than simply code that worked as described: they saw a novel financial network unlike anything they’d previously encountered. And so they heeded Satoshi’s request to keep their node listening on port 8333 to support the network and got on with their daily lives while, in the background, they began running Bitcoin.